Reddit announced it is banning the controversial and influential subreddit channel ‘The_Donald,’ one of the site’s largest political communities and a long-standing hub of support for President Trump, along with 2,000 other subreddit groups and users as an act against hate speech.
What We Know:
- Reddit, one of the largest social networking and message board websites, on Monday banned its biggest community devoted to President Trump as part of an overhaul of its hate speech policies. The community or “subreddit,” called ‘The_Donald,’ is home to almost 800,000 users who post memes, viral videos, and supportive messages about Mr. Trump.
- Reddit executives said the group, which has been highly influential in cultivating and encouraging Trump’s online base, had consistently broken its rules by allowing people to target and harass others with hate speech. “Reddit is a place for community and belonging, not for attacking people,” Steve Huffman, the company’s co-founder and CEO, said in a call with reporters. “‘The_Donald’ has been in violation of that.”
- The ban comes after years of controversy around ‘The_Donald’ and its promotion of racism, anti-Semitism, conspiracy theories, and violent memes starring a cartoon frog. Created in 2015 to discuss and promote Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, it quickly became a hotbed for extreme political rhetoric.
- In 2016, the members of the subreddit amplified the debunked Pizzagate conspiracy theory, in which Hillary Clinton and top Democrats were falsely accused of running a child sex-trafficking ring from a pizza parlor in Washington.
- In August 2017, the subreddit promoted attendance at the Unite The Right rally, a white supremacist and neo-Nazi rally, in Charlottesville, Virginia.
- In April 2018, the Southern Poverty Law Center published a detailed report on ‘The_Donald,’ highlighting the subreddit’s paranoia about “white genocide” and its support of ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Myanmar. It also contained vicious anti-black racism and anti-Semitism and a fascination with imagining violence against the media.
- The community was seen as a favorite of Trump himself, who hosted a question-and-answer session there during the Democratic National Convention in 2016 and appeared to pull content directly from the subreddit to use in his tweets. Also included was the video “The Trump Effect,” which originated on ‘The_Donald’ in mid-2016 but was later shared by Trump, who tweeted it to his 83 million followers.
- Reddit has previously taken a series of actions to corral ‘The_Donald,’ including “quarantining” the subreddit in June 2019, meaning that it could no longer show up in site search results and couldn’t display ads. But it has consistently defended its choice not to ban it with Huffman vocally resisting calls to remove the subreddit until now.
- Reddit also announced the removal of 2,000 other communities, including the 160,000 member subreddit associated with the popular left-wing podcast Chapo Trap House. The vast majority of the forums that are being banned are inactive.
- The company unveiled new content rules on Monday, saying, “Reddit is a place for creating community and belonging, not for attacking marginalized or vulnerable groups of people. Everyone has a right to use Reddit free of harassment, bullying, and threats of violence”. The new policy’s preamble states in part that “no community should be used as a weapon,” and that users should not “interfere” with communities they are not a member of—a reference to the long-standing tradition of “brigading,” or coordinated trolling.”
- Reddit said that as of Monday, it was introducing eight rules that laid out the terms that users must abide. Those include prohibiting targeted harassment, revealing the identities of others, posting sexually exploitative content related to underage children, or trafficking in illegal substances or other illicit transactions. The site had already banned many of these behaviors, but the latest changes take a harder line on speech that “promotes hate based on identity or vulnerability.”
- Huffman said users on ‘The_Donald’ had frequently violated its first updated rule: “Remember the human.” Huffman said he and others at Reddit repeatedly tried to reason with moderators of ‘The_Donald,’ who run the subreddit on a volunteer basis. Still, the decision to ban the forum was a last-ditch effort to contain harassment, he said. “We’ve given them many opportunities to be successful,” Huffman said. “The message is clear that they have no intention of working with us.”
- Many Republican lawmakers have accused social media companies of censoring conservative viewpoints on their sites, but Huffman responded, saying banning “The_Donald” was not an attempt to target conservatives specifically. Reddit executives said they hope the site can remain a forum for civil political discourse in the future, as long as users played by its rules. “There’s a home on Reddit for conservatives, there’s a home on Reddit for liberals,” said Benjamin Lee, Reddit’s general counsel. “There’s a home on Reddit for Donald Trump.”
- Social media sites are facing backlash over the types of content they host and their responsibilities to moderate and police that content. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit initially positioned themselves as neutral sites, but users are now pushing them to take steps against hateful speech on their platforms.
- Twitter started adding labels last month to some of Mr. Trump’s tweets, or removed them completely, to refute their accuracy or call them out for glorifying violence.
- Snap, the parent company to Snapchat, said it would stop promotingTrump’s Snapchat account after determining that his public off-the-site comments could incite violence.
- Streaming and gaming website Twitch suspended Trump’s account for violating its policies against hateful conduct. Trump’s channel had rebroadcast one of his campaign rallies from 2015, in which he denigrated Mexicans and immigrants.
- YouTube also said on Monday that it was barring six channels for violating its policies. They included those of two prominent white supremacists, David Duke and Richard Spencer, and the American Renaissance, a white supremacist publication.
- Facebook has said it refuses to police content, saying it would allow all speech from political leaders to remain on its platform, even if the posts were untruthful or problematic because such content was newsworthy and in the public’s interest to read. The site has come under increasing fire for its stance, with many large advertisers like Verizon and Coca-Cola pulling advertisements. Last week, however, the site announced it will be placing warning labels on problematic posts and will remove content that incites violence or attempts to suppress voting.
Reddit’s decision is part of a broad shift away from the hands-off approach long embraced by online platforms that have claimed to be neutral in the face of whatever users publish. While all problems of hateful and abusive comments won’t be solved with one policy update, the changes made by these platforms are, at least, evidence of a belated willingness to respect the lived experience of its users.
